The last period of Wassily Kandinsky's life is often considered of little significance to the art world. He was living in Paris during the Second World War and he had taken on yet a new artistic style, often painting scattered biomorphic figures on panels of textured wood (as other materials were scarce). These pieces have long been overshadowed by his vivid Munich period and dynamic Bauhaus work, which have come to define his career. Now critics are taking a second look at the work created in the last years of the Russian painter's life.

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Today, "Kandinsky in Paris" opens at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and explores the painter's lesser known abstract innovations. Tracey Bashkoff, senior curator at the Guggenheim, gives ELLE.com an exclusive preview of what we can look forward to in the exhibition.

You shared 'Little Accents' with us (above). Tell us about it.

It has always been a personal favorite of mine. It is a charming, lovely image and I have always enjoyed how the little forms sit on those wires in a very playful, active manner. They look like these little embryos, organism, and microscopic things, but at the same time they seem to come out of some of the geometry.

Was it meant to be a musical reference, like the bars of a scale?

Absolutely, music was never far from Kandinsky's mind. They certainly look like these music notations that have come to life. His ideas of synesthesia—that one could hear color and see sound—were certainly really influential in his earlier writings and never go away completely. It also seems so connected to Klee. Paul Klee was ill in these last years and died several years before Kandinsky and it was a death that Kandinsky took very hard.

Tell us about 'Dominant Curve,' one of the larger pieces in the show?

It combines some of the scientific explorations that he was looking for. It uses a color palate the reflects on the earlier Russian paintings he was doing even before he went to Munich, in the very early days of his career, so you see elements that come from that in the work as well. Its scale is so grand that it feels like it has a weight and an importance. Some people have talked about it as being an optimistic vision of a peaceful future. Kandinsky's ideas that abstraction could bring the public to a higher plane of understanding, freeing them up from their consumerist fascination.

Is that imaginative nature more prevalent in his work than with other artists at the time?

He always talked about it being an expression of his inner necessity—the inner life of the artist, [which was shared by] some other artist like [Joan] Miró and [Jean] Arp. Miró was interested in the ideas of the subconscious and the unconscious as well. Kandinsky had, not grander, but more programmatic aims that had to do with these societal goals of producing abstraction that would elevate society—how color could convey certain meaning and forms could covey balance [and have] a connection to the cosmos. He had a more proclaimed, larger grand-scale scheme for his program. It was a combination of both inner vision and a utopian goal and that separates him from some of the other artists working in abstraction at that time.

The Guggenheim has a special gallery dedicated to Kandinsky and over 250 of his paintings are in the collection. What is the relationship between the artist and the museum?

When Frank Lloyd Wright was first commissioned to construct the building, Hilla Rebay asked him to build a temple to the spirit. Certainly, it was work like Kandinsky's that she had in mind to fill this building in her utopian ideas about the power of abstraction. Whenever we see his pieces in the Frank Lloyd Wright building it feels at home, it feels like work that the building was meant for.